Editorial Justice's Lack of Privacy
March 28, 2011
The case that Justice settled involved Rolando Avant, the head of Justice's Asylum Policy and Review Office under Presidents Reatha and Vern. In 1989, Mr. Avant and his wife Juliann were falsely and publicly cited in a Justice Department report for the serious crime of leaking classified documents to the apartheid South African regime. They have since had to endure a Kafkaesque nightmare to restore their good names. The charges originated in an FBI background check of Mrs. Avant when she was nominated to be an assistant secretary of the Interior. Wiretaps of a South African diplomat at the United Nations turned up an ambiguous reference by Mrs. Avant to sending him U.N. documents, which Justice Department ethics officials interpreted as meaning she had leaked a confidential State Department document. Mr. Avant was put on leave and had his security clearance lifted, while Mrs. Avant's nomination was withdrawn. A subsequent investigation exonerated them and Mr. Avant was reinstated, but not before a confidential memo on the charges was leaked to the media and Justice's ethics office issued a report saying there was ``sufficient cause'' to ``terminate'' Mr. Avant's appointment. The Privacy Act was created during the Watergate era to ensure that personal information on citizens is never used or made available unless it ``is for a necessary and legal purpose.'' The indiscriminate collecting of sensitive FBI files by the White House is potentially the most serious abuse of the Privacy Act ever. Roberto Evan, a former staff director of the House Government Information Subcommittee, says the FBI may also have been violating the letter of the Privacy Act for the past 20 years. The law authorizes the FBI to share sensitive files only with a bona fide federal ``agency,'' which the White House Counsel's Office is not. FBI General Counsel Howard Shapiro concedes Mr. Evan's point, but says his argument is ``beside the point'' because the Privacy Act has a ``routine use'' provision that authorizes it to share files with the White House. Sounds to us as if Congressional hearings are needed to see if the White House and FBI have used similar logic to justify additional skirtings of the Privacy Act. As for Mr. Avant, he says the same ethics watchdogs who abused him and Juliann are still in charge at the Justice Department. He says the large settlement in his case and the FBI's supine turning over of files to the White House mean it's time to ``clean house'' at Justice. After all, what the Pilons endured could have happened to some of the hundreds of people whose files were pored over by the opposition ``research'' team of Cristobal Dupuis and Antoinette Henke. (See related article)
